Refugee crisis or invasion?

At an immigration checkpoint in Hungary a television crew caught and interesting image. After the on-camera talent had signed off, the cameraman continued to pan the scenery for B-roll video to accompany the news broadcast. A well built young man caught the eye of the camera man and made a very clear gesture seeming to threaten the cameraman with beheading. Hardly the act of an oppressed refugee thankful for a ticket out of the seething, effervescing s**thole that is the Arab world.

The dominant media narrative of the ongoing refugee crisis is beginning to look tenuous. The famous image of the dead boy on the beach has matured and now we find that he was actually NOT a refugee from Syria. His family had fled Syria about three years ago for Turkey, returned briefly to Syria this summer, and then moved back to Turkey. In short, there was no reason for Aylan Kurdi to be on a boat in the Mediterranean larger than his father’s desire to smuggle him to relatives in Canada. A tragedy, to be sure, but not one directly linked to anything happening in Syria:

Ms. Kurdi, speaking Thursday in a Vancouver suburb, said that their father, still in Syria, had suggested Abdullah [ed note: the father of the dead boy] go to Europe to get his damaged teeth fixed and find a way to help his family leave Turkey. She said she began wiring her brother money three weeks ago, in €1,000 ($1,100) amounts, to help pay for the trip.

Now the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has posted some interesting statistics on the refugee crisis. First, barely half of the refugees are from Syria.

Even this number is arguable because the trade in fake Syrian passports so asylum can be claimed is a big business:

A number of migrants arriving in Turkey hoping to reach Europe are purchasing fake Syrianpassports in order to claim asylum at the end of their journey, the head of the European border management agency Frontex told French radio today.

“There is a traffic of Syrian passports,” Fabrice Leggeri told Europe 1, “because it’s extremely lucrative for smugglers.”

Syrian citizens are legally entitled to refugee status in any European country because of the civil war in their country.

Those using fake passports, Leggeri said, are mainly from North Africa or the Middle East, migrating for economic reasons. But he admitted that authorities do not have a complete picture of those migrating to Europe.

The route the refugees are taking to Europe also indicates that the Turks are up to their greasy little eyeballs in this crisis. The Turks allege that they have taken in over two million refugees and haven’t gotten fair treatment (I suspect this means money) from Europe. The route diagram says this could not be happening unless the Turks were allowing it to happen, or encouraging it to happen.

What is more unsettling is the demographic breakout. (see the image at the top of the page, does anything stand out?)

Anyone else see a problem with this? It doesn’t match any other war-induced refugee flow in the history of mankind. It looks very similar to what you see coming across the US southern border, in other words, it is not a humanitarian issue, it isn’t non-combatants fleeing war; it is economic… or something more sinister.

While there is no doubt that there is a humanitarian crisis underway in Syria, there is equally no doubt that no more than half of the refugees showing up in Europe are Syrian and that most of those are young men seeking jobs. There is equally no doubt that within this flow of young, military aged men there are a lot of ISIS soldiers.